


Tale of Three Witches, Willow, Tara, and Amy. - 2002

by shadowkat67



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Essays, Meta, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-13
Updated: 2009-07-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22395532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Relationships: Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg
Kudos: 2





	Tale of Three Witches, Willow, Tara, and Amy. - 2002

Fifteen years ago, while I was at Colorado College, studying myth, folklore and English lit, a coven of Wiccans came to speak with us. People came expecting fortune telling and tarot card readings and were sadly disappointed. Men and Women from the coven explained that Wicca is a religion that celebrates the earth and unlike the more patriarchal religions, is interested in the reaffirmation of life and the natural balance of all things. In Wicca you obtain power from mother earth and return it back to her. Whatever you take must be returned. When we die we return to the earth and she brings us forth in a new form. We are all a part of her and she is part of us. The moon and the earth and tides are intricately connected and create a positive energy matrix in which we can all draw strength. Too much of one type of energy throws it out of wack, causes chaos. Wiccans hunt balance between the two, negative and positive, not all one or the other. Tornados and hurricanes are considered as much a valuable part of nature as a sunrise. You must respect the mother and trust her to provide. You must respect the boundaries, because if you ignore them, push them or twist them to your own ends, you reap the results.

Tara is Wiccan. She represents the earth and all it provides. She is mother, lover, and friend. She accepts without judgment. She leaves when raped, but can provide forgive when atonement is made. Of the Scoobies - Tara has ascended to the realm of adulthood. She is a complete personality. Mature. Forgiving. Able to deal to handle her world with respect and trust, which was probably why she like Buffy in The Gift, was killed. In the Buffyverse - ascension tends to lead to the afterlife.

When we first meet Tara - she is uncertain, stuttering, shy. But when she uses magic, it is white and pure and usually gentle. Only once does she misuse it and this in reaction to the prejudice and disdain her family shows her. Her family represents the cruel unbending judgment of the patriarchal world, where everything is black and white, the harsh world of the sun. Women must be kept in line. Magic is wrong. As her father, Mr. Maclay states in FAMILY(Season 5, Btvs): "You can't control what's going to happen. You have evil inside of you and it will come out. And letting yourself work all this magic is only going to make it worse. Where do you think that power comes from?"

It's fitting that Tara's family calls Tara a demon and considers her magic "evil". Demon's come from the earth - Riley and the Initiative even categorize them as "subterrean creatures" or earth dwellers. And as such, they are below us, beasts of burden that should be used or killed. Tara's family decides that her use of magic, her ability to tap into the power of the earth, makes her their beast of burden, an animal that must be kept in line.

We do not deal well with people who use unfamiliar techniques to heal others or practice religious rites that contrast with our own. In the early part of our country's history, we hanged witches and persecuted them, because we saw them as evil. Paganism is still considered by many to be the same as devil worship. If you practice magic or do something outside of what is considered "acceptable behavior" you are demonized. Tara has been demonized by her family and peers her whole life for her beliefs and her sexual orientation.

> Tara: "I thought maybe we could do a spell - make people talk again. I'I'd seen you in the group, the wicca group you were... you were different than them. I mean they didn't seem to know..."  
>  Willow: "What they were talking about."  
>  Tara: "I think if they saw a witch they would run the other way."  
>  She smiles and laughs. (HUSH , Season 4, BTvs)  
>  Tara knows all about hiding. Her whole life she has had to hide. Her religious practices and her practice of magic. When she first meets Willow, she is desperately trying to find a place to belong. She stutters and she is shy. As Tara's brother Donny tells her upon being introduced to her friends: "What, uh, all of you hang out? Wow. That's more people than you met in high school." Just prior to that scene, Tara had attempted to tell her new friends a joke and was rejected, they didn't get it.  
>  GILES: Yes, uh, we'll, we'll, uh, find her weaknesses, and then, uh-  
>  TARA: Yeah. You learn her source, (grins) and, uh, we'll introduce her to her insect reflection. (Everyone looks at her in confusion. Tara stops smiling.) Um ... that, that was funny if you, um, studied Taglarin mythic rites... (softly) and are a complete dork. (FAMILY)  
> 

We meet her family and realize that not only has she felt the need to hide her magic, she's also felt that she has to hide being a demon. She's not a demon of course, but her family believes she is. And so she believes it too. How often do we accept someone else's interpretation of who we are as the true one? In Tara's case, her father, whom she trusted, had an ulterior motive for labeling her a demon. As Spike states, after he proves that Tara is human, "There's no demon in there. That's just a family legend, am I right? (Mr. Maclay looks angry) Just a bit of spin to keep the ladies in line." (FAMILY, Season 4, Btvs.)

Willow's problem is somewhat different from Tara's. They are alike in the sense that they have both been cruelly rejected by peers. Willow was treated as the nerdy geek, constantly pushed aside. Cruel comments such as Cordelia's "nice to see you've found the softer side of Sears" seem to be the rule until Willow meets Buffy and begins to blossom into her own. No longer taking the views of her peers as gospel. But the pain is still there, deeply imbedded inside her. It is in reaction to this pain that Willow turns to magic, while Tara has been practicing all along.  
Tara's use of magic has to do with her love of her mother. Her mother used magic and taught Tara how as well. When she practices, Tara feels a connection to her mother and to her mother's beliefs. To Tara - magic is a reaffirmation of life and the love she feels for her mother.

>   
>  Willow: "How long have you been practicing?"  
>  Tara: "Always, I mean, since I um, was little... my, my mom used to,  
>  She um, she had a lot of power, like you." (HUSH, Season 4, Btvs)

Interesting what Tara says to Willow - her mother had natural ability. The power was there bubbling beneath the surface. Willow - Tara senses also has natural ability. The ability attracts Tara - partly because it reminds her of her mother, it also frightens her.

> WILLOW: S-O-R-T of. (Tara frowns) I mean, I just feel like the-the junior partner. You've been doing everything longer than me. You've been out longer ... you've been practicing witchcraft way longer.  
>  TARA: Oh, but you're way beyond me there! In just a few- I mean ... it frightens me how powerful you're getting.  
>  WILLOW: (frowns) That's a weird word.  
>  TARA: (nervous smile) "Getting"?  
>  WILLOW: It frightens you? *I* frighten you? (Tough Love, Season 5, Btvs.)

We don't know how Tara's mother died, just that she was sick for a long time and finally it ended. But I have always wondered if magic had something to do with it, particularly based on her father's words. "Demon. The women in our family... have demon in them. Her mother had it. That's where the magic comes from."

But Tara's relationship with her family and with her mother is very different from Willow's. If Tara learned magic as a means of becoming closer to her mother and honoring her mother's memory, Willow learned it as a means of garnering her absentee parents affections. In the beginning, magic was Willow's way of rebelling. Against her mother, against her friends, against her world, while for Tara - magic was way she melded with her world, celebrated it, loved it.

> Willow: (stands up) No, Ma, hear this! I'm a rebel! I'm having a rebellion!  
>  Sheila: (smiling) Willow, honey, you don't need to act out like this to prove your specialness.  
>  Willow: Mom, I'm not acting out. I'm a witch! I-I can make pencils float. And I can summon the four elements. Okay, two, but four soon. (her mother doesn't react) A-and I'm dating a musician. (Gingerbread, Btvs Season 3)

Compare this with Tara who tells Willow that she was practicing magic with her mother. Tara received affection through magic. Even with Willow - magic is a source of love. When they first join hands and combine their talents it is as if they are making love for the first time. Tara's magic comes from acceptance, confidence, love and kindness. Willow's comes from pain, rejection, fear, and uncertainty. In Dopplegangland - Willow reacts to rejection she perceives from friends and teachers by practicing dark magic with Anya. As a result, she accidentally brings EvilWillow back from an Alternate Universe. In Something Blue - Willow casts a dangerous spell to help her get past the pain of OZ leaving her and places all of her friends in jeopardy as a result. For Willow - magic is a drug that she can use to make herself feel better to alter the world to her liking. To Tara, magic is a religion, a way of communing with the earth.

> WILLOW: (to Tara) Then what? This isn't something that's gonna be fixed by a video club. I know I messed up, okay, and ... I wanna fix it.  
>  TARA: I can't believe that we are talking about this again. You know how powerful magic is, how dangerous. You could hurt someone, you ... you could hurt yourself.  
>  WILLOW: (shaking head) I know a spell that will make her forget she was ever in heaven.  
>  TARA: (angrily) God, what is wrong with you?! (Tabula Rasa, Season 6 Btvs.)

Another difference between Willow and Tara, Willow believes magic can fix everything including their relationship. Giles and Tara both assumed that Willow's power came from a deep respect for the natural forces. It doesn't. Tara's power comes from that because she was taught to respect those forces. Tara is Wiccan. Willow only joined a Wiccan group in college to learn spells. The meetings bore her. Even Oz, before he leaves, cautions Willow about her increased dependence on magic. He senses that it comes from a dark place inside her just like his power does. "I know what it's like to have power you can't control. I mean, every time I start to wolf out, I touch something -deep - dark. It's not fun.." (FEAR ITSELF, Season 4, Btvs) Tara doesn't start to sense this until much later and Giles doesn't appear to sense it at all. Perhaps that's part of the problem, Giles, Willow's mentor, never really took magic that seriously, when he is stripped of his memory, he calls it chicanary and balderdash in Tabula Rasa. Oh don't get me wrong - he has a respect for it, but not a deep one. And this view, he may have inadvertently passed on to Willow, who whether Giles likes it or not has adopted him as her role model and father figure to replace the ones that ignore her.

If Willow believes magic can solve everything - a belief that has been reinforced over five seasons, is it any wonder she attempts to use it to solve her problems with Tara? Yes - what she does to Tara is wrong. But in Willow's head - she's just fixing things. Like she did way back in Season 3 when she helped Buffy and the others fight the mayor, or like she did in Season 4 when she joined their essences with Buffy to fight Adam or like she does in Season 5, by entering Buffy's brain to snap her out of her catatonic state. How, Willow wonders, is this really any different? It's not "rape" to Willow, it is controlling the situation, fixing it, so that things work out the way she wants them to.

> WILLOW: Violate you? I ... I-I didn't ... mean anything like that, I-I, I just wanted us not to fight any more. I love you.  
>  TARA: If you don't wanna fight, you don't fight. You don't use magic to make a fight disappear.

Willow doesn't realize that she's violating more than Tara's mind here, she's violating her trust. Tara trusted Willow not to hurt her the way Glory did. But Willow did and as a result, Tara leaves no longer able to trust Willow. Their love was built on trust - without it there is nothing. But it's not just Tara's trust Willow breaks when she uses magic, she also breaks the trust her world of the sacred order of the universe, she breaks the trust of the earth from which she pulls her power from and as a result her power is dark and consuming not light and healing like Tara's.

Enter Amy the rat. Poor Amy - she is also the product of bad parenting and neglect. In the third episode of Btvs, Witch, we are introduced to Amy and her mother Catherine Madison. Catherine is a bit like Willow is now. She uses magic to twist the world into the version she wishes to experience. In Catherine's case that is reliving her glory days as a high school cheerleader. She goes to extremes to accomplish this, including switching bodies with her daughter, mutilating the other cheerleading candidates and almost killing Buffy. Catherine believes she's justified that she desires a second go. As she tells Amy: "How dare you raise your hand to your mother! I gave you birth. I gave up my life so you could drag that worthless carcass around and call it living?" Poor Amy - her mother rejected her in the worst way possible - is it any wonder Amy begins to go down the same path? Amy like Willow starts using magic to make her world work for her. But instead of accessing the power of the earth, she accesses the power of the hellmouth, of darkness, just as her mother did before her. Magic eventually becomes Amy's drug - she goes after more and more of it, until she messes up on a spell and turns herself into a rat. It's not until three years later that Willow is able to undo it. Something Amy resents her for. This is made clear when Amy visits Willow in Double Meat Palace. In this episode, Amy has given a recovering Willow a taste of magic. Willow furious with Amy for doing this tells her never to visit her again.

> WILLOW: You don't get it. What you did to me was wrong. Do you have any idea how much harder that makes, just, everything?  
>  AMY: You know what I notice? You're not denying that you had fun.  
>  WILLOW: Shut up.  
>  AMY: Oh, yeah. Sharp argument you got there. Were you on the debate team? I forget. I forgot a lot while you were failing to make me be not a rat. (DMP, Btvs Season 6)

If Tara represents Willow's light side and the ways magic can be used to heal the world. Amy represents her dark side or the ways that magic should not be used. Amy uses magic to make herself feel better just as her mother used it before her. In Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered, Season 2 Btvs, Xander discovers Amy using magic to lie to the teacher about her homework. He blackmails her with this knowledge, causing her to cast a very dangerous love spell which causes every woman Xander meets to fall madly in love with him. The next time we see Amy is in Gingerbread where she and Willow are almost burned at the stake for practicing magic. At this point their spells are harmless incantations used to protect those that they love. But it is in this episode that Amy turns herself into a rat. Now three years later, de-ratted Amy, visits a magic den, steals sage from the Summers house and attempts to pull Willow into her addiction. Magic is fun, a trip to Disneyland - Amy tells Willow. "You're telling me that you didn't have a genuine blast? Come on, that was a sweet spell. That was like a trip to Disneyland without the lines." (Doublemeat Palace).

But magic is not just a drug to Willow. Magic is a little bit more. As Willow tells Buffy in Wrecked:

> WILLOW: I mean ... if you could be ... you know, plain old Willow or super Willow, who would you be? (looks at Buffy) I guess you don't actually have an option on the whole super thing.  
>  BUFFY: Will, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't need magic to be special.  
>  WILLOW: Don't I? I mean, Buffy, who was I? Just ... some girl. Tara didn't even know that girl. (Wrecked, Season 6, Btvs.)

As far back as Becoming Part II, Season 2 Btvs, Willow has relied on magic to help the team. She believes that it makes her important. A superhero. She can wreck vengeance. Kill the bad guy. Without magic, she's just that geeky nerd who found the softer side of Sears. A nerd that no one in their right mind could ever love. What does she say in Doomed, after OZ has left - "Percy called me a nerd. I'm not a nerd anymore. I dated a musician." How does Amy get her to go out and wreck havoc on the Bronze in Smashed? "Maybe ... you'd rather sit home all night, alone, like in high school." Willow doesn't use magic as a drug, she uses it to hide the person she hates inside. She uses it to wreck vengeance on those who hurt who she loves - such as Glory in Tough Love. I always found the scene in Tough Love to be very frightening. After Tara gets brain-sucked by Glory, against everyone's advice, Willow goes after the hell god. She actually manages to inflict pain on Glory - which Buffy later comments on in The Gift. "Will, you're the only person that's ever hurt Glory. At all. You're my best shot at getting her on the ropes?" And Willow's magic didn't stop there - when we return to Btvs in Season 6, Willow is running the SG. She is in telepathic communication with all of them. She is also working on a spell to raise Buffy from the dead. This is way past stealing sage or visiting the local Warlock for a energy fix. Willow has delved into the darkest magic and she has found a way to bend it to her whim, use it to make the world work the way she wants it to. Tara was right to be frightened. The power lodged inside Willow is not connected to the earth or from the same source as Tara's, it runs counter to it. It resides in chaos, from the hell mouth Willow has lived near her entire life. Willow's power is not like Buffy's , a gift from the Powers That Be, nor is it a celebration of Wicca. It is dark and it howls deep inside her. The only thing that has kept her power in check up to this point may have been Tara.

If Amy is the dark, mischievous side of Willow's personality, Tara is the light. Tara is Willow's spirit, what keeps her grounded. Without Tara, Willow would be lost. And that is not a good thing. When we grow up - we have to learn how to deal with the world and all its challenges. We can't rely on outside sources like partners or magic to handle our reality or hide from ourselves. Tara left Willow because she correctly saw Willow relying on her as a crutch. She may have returned to Willow too soon, but as she states in Entropy, she missed Willow and just didn't want to spend all the time trying to build it all up again. She wanted to skip over that stage. She wanted to move on. But Willow hadn't changed, not really. She hadn't learned that magic isn't the way to handle emotional strife or deal with emotional issues. You have to handle them the hard way by going through them.

> Willow: I just can't stand feeling this way. I want it to be over.  
>  Buffy: It will. I promise. But it's gonna take time.  
>  Willow: Well, that's not good enough.  
>  Buffy: I know. It's just how it is. You have to go through the pain.  
>  Willow: Well, isn't there someway I can just make it go away? Just 'cause I say so? Can't I just make it go 'poof'? (Something Blue, Season 4, btvs)

Therein lies the difference between our three witches. Tara pushes herself through the pain, she returns to Willow eventually, but she doesn't use magic to control the relationship or handle her pain. Amy uses magic like a drug to deal with pain, to deal with the changes in her world, to have fun. And Willow? She uses magic to make the pain go poof. Her solution to problems is to wave a magic wand and make them disappear. That as Tara has mentioned on more than one occasion isn't what magic is for. But Willow hasn't learned that yet - she still believes she can make the pain go poof, that she can bend reality to her will, that she can hide. As a result, her magic unlike Tara's will always reside in darkness and will always cause misery and pain most of all to Willow herself. Wiccans believe that the pain you send out comes back to you three-fold, hence - Amy being turned into a rat after casting her dangerous spells. Catherine, Amy's mother, was sucked into the dark heart of her own trophy while trying to kill Buffy. One can only hope a similar fate does not await Willow due to her desire to make pain go poof.


End file.
